After the last Hippies vs. Punks post back in April I felt guilty about my mildly condemning juxtaposition of Pink Floyd’s meandering, soporific double album Ummagumma (1969) with the frenetic dance-friendly Post-Punk music of bands like The Fleshtones. I felt guilty because I think Ummagumma is a great record. My two favorite Pink Floyd albums are Ummagumma and its follow-up Atom Heart Mother (1970).
Post-Punk begat or, depending on how you look at it, is synonymous with Hardcore. The Hardcore of my young-man youth had a distinct world view (just as the Hippies had their own world view). The literary foundation of the Hardcore world view was the poetry and fiction of Charles Bukowski, popularized in no small part by Barbet Schroeder’s feature-length film, Barfly (1987), starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.
Interestingly, Barbet Schroeder, if you listen to him tell it, played a role in Pink Floyd’s post-Syd Barrett success. Schroeder sought them out to provide a soundtrack to his debut film, More (1969). Once the film became a smash hit in Europe, Pink Floyd rode it’s coattails to a larger audience.
There is evidence that Schroeder is telling the truth. The Syd Barrett psychedelic albums, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) and A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), charted in three countries -- the U.S., UK and France -- upon their initial release. More charted in France, the UK and Holland, but added a fourth country, the U.S., when it cracked the Billboard 200 on its re-release in 1973 (still the Hippie period).
Recorded and released the same year as Ummagumma, the soundtrack to More sounds similar, with musique concrete bird songs combined with early electronica (it sounds to me a lot like the first Tangerine Dream album, Electronic Meditation, also recorded in 1969). The difference is that there are a couple toss-off acid rock tracks the band recorded to provide the ambiance of the Paris Hippie scene of the day.
More the movie -- much like its 1969 companion, the Ur-Hippie document Easy Rider -- is a cautionary tale of excess. Instead of violent rednecks murdering Hippies prone to bad acid trips, More features a beautiful German youth, played by Klaus Grünberg, coupling with a beautiful American youth, Mimsy Farmer (who also starred in the 1967 Hippiexploitation classic Riot on Sunset Strip) on the sunny Mediterranean island of Ibiza. They rip off an ex-Nazi’s heroin stash and abscond with it to a beautiful seaside villa where they proceed to shoot smack and rut with abandon. The German youth eventually overdoses, and the movie ends with his burial in a pauper’s grave.
Despite its pessimistic, dreary conclusion, More captures the wide-open horizon of the 1960s. I speak of “horizon” here in the phenomenological or hermeneutic sense of everything that goes unquestioned in one’s temporal-social frame that nonetheless constitutes one’s field of perception or capacity for consciousness.The gestalt. In 1969 it was wide open. The revolution was being born. The sense was that you could do whatever you wanted. The old wartime social homogeneity cultural consensus was dead. The pitfall for youth of the day was that this freedom was bankrupted by the false infinity of hallucinogenic drugs and narcotics.
Fast forward nearly 20 years to Barfly, Minutemen and the Hardcore of my youth. The horizon has been flipped upside down. It is no longer wide open but hidden beneath a flannel sheet of dead-end, low-wage work; cheap liquor, beer and methamphetamine; and a D.I.Y. ethos of creativity eked out at the end of the evening. Almost everything has changed.
Fast forward another 30 years to now, and, as the Minutemen presciently sang in 1985, “reality appears digital,” our horizon is inseparable from the false infinity of information technology. Things are much worse.
What’s beautiful to me about listening to the More soundtrack, as well as Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, is the memory of a wide-open horizon.
Evidence of time-past is all around. The Damned are coming to town soon, on tour to promote a 40th anniversary edition of the album, Damned Damned Damned, the record that kicked off UK Punk. Then in the fall it will be Depeche Mode. Posters are up in abundance. Oh, and this August, at CenturyLink Field, where the Seahawks play, Metallica.
A couple months back, I experienced a "rock is dead" epiphany. I was sitting in a coffee house during my lunch hour, eating a grapefruit and reading the newspaper. Playing on the sound system was some sort of turgid tar-sands Grunge -- Screaming Trees? Skin Yard? And it struck me how truly distant and mothballed rock'n'roll has become.
The whole point of Grunge was to reanimate, revivify the old longhair Hippie headbanger cock-rocker by tapping into the uptempo testosterone of Punk. Well, on this particular winter afternoon, it might as well have been a recording of The Kingston Trio performing at The Purple Onion. That's how dead the sound was. Gone, baby, gone. A set of sensibilities as far removed as the horse-&-buggy days.
Then, not too much later, maybe just a day or two, I happened to be in a different neighborhood, and I decided to try the swank coffee bar in the main lobby of the Seattle Center building that houses the new KEXP studio. The coffee bar is staffed by attractive, well-mannered young adults, and it is next to the front entrance of a large, museum-type room -- almost an auditorium in size -- of architectural concrete. There is a stage for performances at one end of the room and a little Light In The Attic Records kiosk in a corner at the other end; in between are tables and chairs, coaches and stuffed chairs. Young people hang out and study their tablets and laptops. The sound system is state of the art
On this particular afternoon Television was on the PA. I was feeling good from a double espresso. The music sounded pristine and very much alive. Maybe rock isn't dead, but it lives on as a museum piece.
Another band on tour is The Fleshtones. They'll be touring Europe this summer.
I started thinking about The Fleshtones again after listening extensively to The Feelies last month. The Fleshtones, like The Feelies, are a band that we listened to a lot in the first half of the 1980s. Like The Feelies, The Fleshtones got their start performing at CBGBs in 1976. Like The Feelies, The Fleshtones have put out a new album recently. And like The Feelies, I saw The Fleshtones perform live at Berkeley Square in the 1980s.
At the time they were on tour promoting what is now regarded as their most successful album, the I.R.S. Records release, Hexbreaker! (1983). I can't remember if it was the late fall of 1983 or the early winter of 1984 that we -- my girlfriend (wife-to-be), my fellow student co-workers at the U.C. Berkeley library and I -- saw them perform one Friday night. What I can remember is that it was not one of the best shows I have ever seen. It was the best show I have seen. Ever.
This week has been a pleasure because after downloading Hexbreaker! this past Sunday I've been listening to it all week, particularly the title track, "Hexbreaker." I've listened to "Hexbreaker"on repeat over and over. There is something that sax player Gordon Spaeth achieves at the crescendo of the song (there is a technical name for it; I just don't know what it is, when the notes are splaying, the saxophone reed is splintering, like Anthony Braxton is playing in a garage-rock band) that makes me feel as good as I did that night at the Berkeley Square.
I felt so good that night -- dancing side-by-side with my girlfriend and my friends who I worked with at the library -- that I think I stayed high for a whole week. And I wasn't stoned or even that drunk. Toward the end of the show lead singer Pete Zaremba danced a floor tom down to the pit in front of the stage and held it in one arm (no easy feat) while banging on it furiously with the palm of his other hand. We deliriously danced alongside him.
I remember the feeling well. I was high. We were all high. But we kept going higher. I remember thinking, "This has to stop. I can't keep feeling this good." But it just kept getting better and better.
The show finally ended with a bunch of people following Zaremba back up on stage and pogoing with him and the rest of the band, Zaremba placing a headlock on a Marilyn lookalike -- short-sleeved A-line dress, curly peroxide-blond hair, shock-red lipstick -- who I recognized from the coffee houses around campus, and dancing with her that way for several minutes.
There are some important Hippies vs. Punks clues to be found here. What The Fleshtones did, what the essence of the band is, is to return rock'n'roll to its rudiments, which is in the garage, before the Hippies, the Haight and the Summer of Love. The template they used is Lenny Kaye's Nuggets. Bands like The Seeds, The Standells, The Chocolate Watchband, Count Five, The Leaves.
When I started thinking about The Fleshtones again I checked first with my public library out of curiosity to see if they had any Fleshtones material in their collection. The only thing that came up in a keyword search was the 1982 film Urgh! A Music War.
Urgh! A Music War is a priceless document memorializing how different the Punk, Post-Punk and New Wave scene was from its Hippie predecessor.
For one, you had a band at the top of the heap for a spell of time, say, 1980 to 1983, that was progressive and supportive of the B- and C-list acts -- Skafish, Au Pairs, Wall of Voodo, The Fleshtones -- and that band was The Police.
Two, the shared traits of Post-Punk music -- the high-treble lead guitar; the robotic and repetitive drumbeat; and most all, the fact that the music is pretty uniformly uptempo -- clearly distinguish it from the lengthy and meandering ruminations of, for instance, Pink Floyd's Ummagumma (1969).
Why? So you can dance.
Nineteen-eighty to 1983 is an interesting period for rock'n'roll. Situated just outside the boundaries of the 1975-to-1979 Hippies-vs.-Punks war, it is pre-MTV and pre-Hardcore. The Hippies aren't an issue. They're zombies off to the side, staggering and stupefied. The essence of music is now dance, movement. 2 Tone ska.
With the ascent of MTV and the music video this kind of simple dance-party vibe gets crushed by commercialism. People like me found our way soon thereafter to Hardcore. The important year being 1984, when both Zen Arcade and Double Nickels on the Dime are released, effectively wiping out all other pole-position aspirants in the rock avant-garde.
But with Hardcore, whether we realized it or not, we were smuggling in a lot of metaphysics that would come back to haunt us. Maybe the metaphysics weren't as pie-eyed as the Hippies, but they were whoppers nonetheless. The divination of the D-I-Y working man for starters. (It is no coincidence that the mass appeal of Charles Bukowski's fiction corresponds to a time when young men were listening every night to "Working Men are Pissed.")
But, really, is there a working class in this country anymore? Was there one in the 1980s? I made a decision in my young-man youth to live as a member of the working class, but aren't we just consumers?
For rock to renew itself I think it has to go back to the garage, back to the dance party.
After work I have to pick up a packet for a race I'm running Sunday morning. It involves a trip up to the Green Lake neighborhood. I don't know what time I will get home. So I am posting the weekly installment of Hippies vs. Punks this morning instead of tonight.
In the 1980s entertaining in the university city of Berkeley usually involved having friends over for beers, sometimes a meal, and then out into the night to go to a bar or a party. Sometimes we would stay all night in the apartment I shared with my girlfriend (who became my wife, and then my ex-wife) and just drink, talk and listen to music. At a certain point in the evening, after all the records had been played, usually sometime around midnight, one album would be placed on the turntable, an album irrefutable and dense, inky black, dark and deep, an album that said, "It is over." That album was Generic Flipper.
Listening to a song like "Life is Cheap" before trundling off to bed to sleep off the alcohol reminded one that the world is ruled by brute force wielded by alien forces -- an important lesson to imbibe along with one's liberal education.
Flipper was formed out of the wreckage of Negative Trend. It combined Negative Trend bassist Will Shatter and drummer Steve DePace with vocalist/bassist Bruce Loose and guitarist Ted Falconi. (A college buddy of mine lived next door to Ted.) The band was controversial in that their slow, bass-driven droning sound went against the speedy grain that dominated California Hardcore.
Generic Flipper -- recorded in 1980 and 1981, released in 1982 -- overlaps with and provides perfect sonic documentation of the "Reagan Recession."
Nineteen-eighty-two was the first time I was living on my own as an adult. Nationwide unemployment hit 10.8% in November and December, higher than any time -- including the Great Recession of 2008 -- since the Great Depression. Attempting to cut inflation Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker took a meat ax to the economy, the prime interest rate hitting 21.5% in June of '82.
Though I was safely ensconced in the protective arms of the university, I remember the vibe of that time of high unemployment. I remember it was a cold fall and winter. Living in an urban environment for the first time I became aware of the shit and piss and broken beer bottle alleyways and the hatred, vomit, rage, junk, dread, squalor, hopelessness of life that Generic Flipper so accurately records.
Reaganism was definitely the end of the line for any Hippies who were still holding out in the early 1980s. Flower Power had been rendered juiceless. The Punks, who first appeared in the avant-garde at the same time as the stagflation of the 1970s, painted a picture of a future we are presently living.
One of the nice things about the about the old location of the local where I work is that it was a convenient walking distance to the Douglass Truth Library. I would often go there during my lunch break and sit in the comfortable chairs and read the New York Times and maybe doze off for a few minutes. I would also browse the music compact discs. One album I discovered was II by The Psychic Paramount. It sounded distinctly different. On the band's Wikipedia page the genres listed are experimental rock, noise rock and psychedelic rock. There's definitely a No Wave/Glenn Branca vibe to it, but it also has a Hardcore/Flipper-like edge.
This morning I heard the last track off II, "N5 Coda," as I suffered up the last hill on my second eight-mile run in as many days (I'm trying to get ready for a 10K next Sunday), and I was reminded how good The Psychic Paramount is.
My cohort at the university all went on to be doctors and lawyers and journalists and professors and IT professionals. I am the odd man out in that I am a secretary, a.k.a., office worker or support staff personnel. This letter, number 40, like last week's, is addressed to my friend Niall; it is devoted to my friendship with his older brother who had just made his mark professionally as a reporter. Though written while drunk, as all these letters were when I first arrived in New York City in my early twenties, it nonetheless contains an honest assessment of aspiration and achievement. The last paragraph is a young man's farewell to friendship.
Spring 1989
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, which means go up to a mountain, on top of a mountain, and say what it is that you want to say. I heard about Colum's successes tonight from Terri, how he's got stuff printed in the WASHINGTON POST and NEWSWEEK and the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, and man I'll tell you, I feel so happy about it, about the deservedness of Colum's successes, so clean and unthreatened and peaceful and devoted, that I almost feel bad about it: one, because I really haven't written to him and provided him with moral support; and two, because it rnakes me realize how unenergetic and unrisky and scared my life really is. Colum had something to do, and he did it, which is what it's all about, isn't it? But he did it alone, and I feel like I kinda stopped being his friend. I never wrote and he never wrote and I never called and he never called, and on and on, dribbling into laziness and unappreciation. The last time I talked to Colum was in January at your place. I remember getting stoned all of us together the first night you were back from LA when Mark and Gail were there; I remember the football game in the parking lot; I remember driving him in my VW bus over the Bay Bridge while he snuggled in the back with Terri wrapped in a sleeping bag; and I remember just me and him alone in the Oak Street apartment -- you had gone over to sleep at Eve's house; Terri and Mark had left to go to a few clubs -- listening to Bob Dylan. That night it was like this: the two old men together, too old to go out and rock with the kiddies, old and forlorn and fundamentally lonely, alone. We chatted for a bit, talked about I don't know what, and then decided to turn in. We walked into your room, shut off the lights, got into bed, put our heads on the pillows, and fell asleep. -- Two old pals alone together and going to bed, no girlfriends to go over and sleep with, no bars to hop, nothing to do but say good night and go to bed. I felt like my dead granddad -- vulnerable and pure and teetering and tired. But none of it bad, not in the least; in fact, very good, totally honest and at home, a kinda of feeling I don't even feel with my own family, except for maybe my father. Oh, well. I can remember more if I tried, but that's not the point. The point is that I feel shitty about not taking more care for Colum.
I think what happened in the last two or three years is that Colum figured out what it is that he wanted to do, and if not wanted to do, what he should do, and should do in the sense of really doing it. We're still wafting around in early twenties uncertainty and fear. He had no time for such shit. And he's right. Hopefully we'll find the energy a few years from now to make the kind of choices he did.
It's not all my fault and it's not all your fault and it's not all Colum's fault. It has something to do with the fact that the earth is the dirt of sadness and that time fades away. -- There will be no more games of One Hand on the porch at night as the black-and-white television blabbers on the kitchen chair; there will be no more hash browns cooked in olive oil on electric stoves in 1985; there will be no more Socrates discussed over coffee and beer and hot dogs as Leslie complains about too much noise; there will be no more pisses in toilets in nooks in apartments on Dana Street. And no matter how much I'm accused of goldbricking, and no matter how much I'm chastised for backward looking and lauding the past, there is one thing I will always be when it comes to things like this, and that is right.
